Munro (Immortals After Dark #18) by Kresley Cole

            For all his years, he’d believed that if he existed long enough, he would catch his mate’s scent from afar, as Will had with Chloe.

            Shock stole through him as it sank in that he’d missed her. He’d lived for a century with false hope, never knowing she’d been cold in the ground.

            Munro had been born for one purpose: to find and protect his mate. And he’d failed. Now he was to get a second chance—courtesy of the warlocks—but she remained vulnerable as a human.

            Kereny said, “From what I’ve heard, I’d say you’ve been enjoying a feckless and debauched life for some time.” She’d sidled far too close to the truth.

            He was just frustrated enough to give it to her. “My brother has been nigh suicidal for centuries. Two things got him through the night: sex and violence. So for all these years, he and I undertook dangerous missions for our king and battled threats to our clan. When we believed vampires had assassinated our ruler, we founded Bheinnrose, a settlement in Nova Scotia, to get Lykae families away from the Horde. But after that, we had no more missions. No more danger. So we prowled for women and hoped for war. You likely would have found me verra debauched.”

            Instead of being scandalized, she casually asked, “How many have you been with?”

            He shrugged. “More than a few. Are you jealous?”

            She shrugged right back at him. “How do I compare to more than a few?”

            “There is no comparison.” They were mates; their experiences should mirror each other. Did she not feel the same raw bliss when they kissed and touched?

            “How many of them have you loved?”

            “Love? You canna pledge your heart when it’s been fated to another,” he said, baffled by her question. “Lykae revere matehood. We believe each of us is unfinished, half of a greater whole, awaiting the right partner. Every second of my existence, I’ve been aware of how incomplete I am.”

            She murmured, “Incomplete.”

            “Aye. But now everything is different.”

            “I find it hard to understand how you’d give up all those lovers for one.”

            Then she was not feeling the same as he was. He sat back, troubled. “As I said, wolves mate for life.” What if she was his, but he wasn’t hers? Such a thing only happened if two beings were of different species.

            Like a human and a Lykae.

            As if reading his mind, she said, “Alas, humans don’t.”

            Her words plagued him far worse than her blade had. “Just one more reason for you to become a wolf. I’ll bring you around.” With time, she’d feel their bond and come to the obvious conclusion: immortality.

            Still, doubts whispered. If he wasn’t her mate and she became a Lykae, she would spurn him.

            No, of course he was hers. All he had to do was recall her response to him earlier. “And mayhap you should no’ knock debauchery since you liked it so well with me.”

            She brushed aside his words. “Tell me why you were set upon such a path for hundreds of years. Why was your brother suicidal?” When he hesitated, she gentled her tone. “You speak of bonds and fate, but I don’t know you, Munro.”

            He paused with the flask at his lips. “You want to?”

            “Maybe.”

            If he told her about his family, would she confide in him about her parents? Fuck it, here goes. “When my brother was only a young boy, he fell into a succubus’s clutches, a fiend named Ruelle. . . .”

            Munro told Kereny how Ruelle had secretly fed off Will for years, twisting him and his beast. When their mother had found out, she’d hunted the succubus, but Ruelle hadn’t been alone. “One of the succubus’s other lovers—a vampire—beheaded my mother.” Munro and Will’s beloved mam. “Da slew the vampire and Ruelle. Then he . . . died by suicide.”

            Or partially. He’d almost managed to take off his own head. A sympathetic friend had helped the rest of the way.

            Munro had adored his father, but after that final act, resentment had gripped him. Now that Munro had a mate, he was starting to fathom his da’s actions. Hadn’t I been ready to follow Kereny into an acid pit? “My brother blames himself for everything. He has little control over his beast and even less over his emotions.”